Stability of Squeak

david at aminal.com david at aminal.com
Tue Aug 14 16:31:33 UTC 2001


On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 09:21:37AM -0400, Mark Guzdial wrote:
> Here at Georgia Tech, Squeak has a (relatively undeserved) reputation 
> for being prone to crashes.  The cause, for the most part, is due to 
> issues outside the software itself:

Like newbies trying to trace through code they don't understand :-)

You may remember, but I was asking questions about simulators, and you
kindly provided some great info about the examples in the blue book.

Well, I was trying to follow the code, and noticed that since a DoNothing
object seems to run in its own process, I couldn't see its interactions
with the simulator by using the debugger. I had used a self halt in the
demo class method to bring up a notify window, and then used the debugger
to step through the code. Even figured out that I had to use the 'send'
button to trace method execution in other objects. So far, so good.

So, next step was to try to follow what a DoNothing does (or doesn't) do.
A self halt is placed in one of the methods that I believe will be executed
by a SimulationObject, (I can't remember exactly where I put it) and then the
code run again.

Squeak hangs, no Alt-, no response to any input at all. Bye bye Squeak window.
Now, I wish that I had made more of an effort to document just what I was doing,
but I wasn't thinking about bug reports, just trying to learn to use Squeak and
trying to understand some code.

I figured it was one of those

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Doctor: So don't do that.


situations.


David Schutt



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